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Sushi Recipes: A Weekend of Fun and Learning

I’ve always loved sushi and even though I gave up dairy, meat and eggs about 18 months ago, I still get my Omegas and Vitamin B12’s from fish and sushi recipes. We had some friends over for dinner this past weekend and ended up making a variety of sushi recipes from scratch. This included Dashi (japanese sea stock), Seaweed Salad, Sushi Rice, Tamago (japanese egg pancake), lots of different veggie rolls and to top it off, two kinds of awesome udon that my wife made. It was quite the feast and I owe much to the Sushi Cookbook for teaching me the subtle art of sushi making and tons of sushi recipes.

Sushi Recipes

Sushi Recipes

Recently I’ve taken to cooking things that I’ve eaten before but didn’t have any clue what the ingredients were nor how to make them – sushi recipes clearly fall into this category. I plan on a few sushi recipes blogs to go over what I learned on making everything from scratch. Sushi recipes really are quite easy, aesthetically pleasing, totally nutritious and as my 12yo said, incredibly gratifying to make a sushi roll with ingredients that you knew everything about. Besides, sushi doesn’t automatically mean fish – the Onigiri recipe that I use as endurance food during long runs is a typical example.

Here are some basic things you’ll need to make sushi recipes.

Bamboo Sushi Rolling Mat. You can pick this up for just a couple of bucks in a local Japanese grocery store. If are you making any kind of roll, this one’s mandatory.

Sushi Rice. You can’t make sushi without the rice and this is short grained white rice, having more starch than other kinds. Also why sushi rice is stickier than Jasmine rice.

Rice Vinegar. This is a pretty versatile ingredient, not only in making sushi rice, but also to help keep your hands clean while making sushi rolls and to use on the knife while cutting the rolls.

Dried Seaweed Mix. For a while the local grocery store used to carry these, but now I get them through Amazon. A little on the pricey side, but this seaweed mix is unbelievably tasty. Simply soak in water and they swell up 8 to 10 times their volume. You can eat them straight up as a salad or stuff them into sushi rolls.

Oh and if you haven’t seen the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, you so need to watch it. While I made the Tamago over a weekend, it apparently takes 10 years of apprenticeship before the interns are allowed to make it. Until then? They massage squids for hours to make Tako. 🙂